The Debacle - Emile Zola [12]
‘For Christ’s sake turn it up!’ shouted Jean. ‘Answer roll-call!’
Lapoulle leaped up in a daze, seemed to understand and bellowed ‘Present’ in such a savage roar that it made Loubet fall on his backside, it was such a scream. Pache, who had finished his sewing, answered almost inaudibly, like muttering a prayer. Chouteau, full of scorn, didn’t even get up, but called out the word and stretched himself out a little more.
Meanwhile Lieutenant Rochas, who was on duty, stood motionless a metre or so away. When the call was over and Sergeant Sapin went up to report that there was nobody missing, he mumbled into his moustache, pointing with a jerk of his chin to Weiss who was still talking to Maurice:
‘There’s even one too many. What’s that character up to over there?’
‘Permission from the colonel, sir,’ Jean, who had overheard, thought he ought to answer. Rochas shrugged angrily and without another word continued his tramp along the tents, waiting for lights out, while Jean, whose legs were giving way after the day’s march, sat down a few paces from Maurice, whose words reached him at first in a jumble which he didn’t listen to, for he himself was weighed down by vague reflections hardly formulated in the depths of his stolid, slow brain.
Maurice was all for war, which he thought was inevitable and vital for the very existence of nations. That had been perfectly plain
to him ever since he had gone in for evolutionist ideas, all this theory of evolution which at that time fascinated the younger intellectuals. Is not life a state of war every second? Is not the very condition of nature a continuous struggle, the survival of the fittest, strength maintained and renewed through action, life rising ever young out of death? He recalled the great burst of enthusiasm which had uplifted him when he had had the idea of atoning for his misdeeds by becoming a soldier and going to fight at the front. Perhaps the France of the plebiscite, by handing itself over to the Emperor, did not want war. A week earlier he himself had declared it iniquitous and stupid. People argued about this candidature of a German prince for the throne of Spain, and in the confusion that had gradually developed everybody seemed in the wrong, so that now nobody really knew which side the provocation had come from, and the one inevitable thing had remained unaltered, the inexorable law which at a given moment throws one nation against another. But a great fever of excitement had run through Paris, and he could still see that burning evening, with crowds surging along the boulevards, bands waving torches and shouting: ‘To Berlin! To Berlin!’ He could still hear the tall, beautiful woman with the
regal profile, standing on a coachman’s box in front of the Hôtel de Ville, wrapped in the folds of the flag and singing the ‘Marseillaise’. Was it all a lie, then? Had the heart of Paris not beaten? And later, as always with him, the nervous elation had been followed by hours of dreadful doubt and revulsion: his arrival in the barracks, the sergeant major who had signed him on, the sergeant who had issued him his uniform, the stinking barrack-room and the revolting filth, the coarse familiarity with his new companions, the routine drill which exhausted his limbs and stupefied his brain. And yet in less than a week he had got used to it and lost his disgust. Then his enthusiasm had taken over again when the regiment had at last set off for Belfort.
From the outset Maurice had been absolutely certain of victory. For him the Emperor’s plan was clear: hurl four hundred thousand men at the Rhine, cross the river before the Prussians were ready, separate North Germany from South by a vigorous thrust, and thanks to some striking victory, immediately force Austria and Italy to side with France. Hadn’t there been a rumour, at one moment, that the 7th army corps,